The presets (--alt-preset xxx) for the 3.90.X branch of LAME were designed by many of the original members of this site and were exhaustively tested to make sure that they utilized the best possible settings for quality. Subsequent versions of LAME broke compatibility with these presets to allow for many other improvements (faster, bug issues, etc), thus making a temporary regression in quality. LAME 3.96.1 seemed as though it might be about the same quality as 3.90.3 in some of the tests done after it was released. However, in the minds of the administration of this forum it has not yet been tested extensively enough, thus 3.90.3 is still the recommended version. LAME 3.96.1 has been proven to be of superior quality for some bitrates where there are no VBR presets for 3.90.3, only ABR. Thus 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard is considered to be better than 3.96.1 -V 2 (--preset standard) but 3.96.1 -V 5 (approximatly 128kb/s) is better then 3.90.3 --alt-preset 128. It is also worth noting that 3.96.1 is at least twice as fast as 3.90.3 for encoding and that -V 2 produces slightly smaller files then --alt-preset standard.

Thanks, I tried to make it as concise as possible while hitting all the important issues. Perhaps this could replace "Differences between Lame 3.90.3 APS and 3.93.1 APS -ZLAME 3.93.1 vs 3.90.3" in the FAQ? As not too many people are asking about 3.93.1 these days .